Recap 2022

At the end of each quarter, I write a private "review" where I look back at the previous 3 months and jot down what went well, what went bad and how well my theme of the year worked.

Inspired by Freek and Ryan I thought I write a short review of the entire year and make it public.

Personal #

I don't want to share too much of my personal life. Like telling about last-night dreams, for others it's usually boring.

What I can say is that my mental health is much better than it was in 2020 and 2021. I can cope much better with stress from my day-job or from open source work.
I no longer have the feeling to answer issues immediately after I have seen them (disabling email notifications in GitHub helped a lot!), implement all features people ask for or implement new features immediately.

Another good change regarding mental health was uninstalling all social media apps (Twitter, Reddit) from my phone. So much time wasted scrolling through these slot machine apps, which would better be spent reading a book or doing some other activity.

However, I'm grateful that Twitter exists. I connected and met many talented and interesting people through Twitter.
In 2022 I also met online friends in real life. Either for lunch or dinner or at the Laravel Switzerland Meetup in Bern or Zurich. Going to these meetups was truly one of the highlights this year. Listening to talks, hear stories from other developers or discuss a certain bug or feature with others is so cool.

Other highlights this year were going to concerts I wanted to attend to for forever, doing some solo hikes in the Swiss alps (only 2-3 big hikes this year; want to do multi-day hikes in 2023) and doing a tandem paragliding flight this summer.

Work #

I still work as a full stack developer at 2media. Next year will be the 10th anniversary.
Even though I've been there for 10 years, each week and month brings new challenges and my actions have a high impact – which I really like.

A big highlight from this year is upgrading an application from Vue.js 2 to Vue.js 3 and adding an E2E testsuite using Playwright.

Freelance #

Next year I would like to start doing some freelance work. Not entirely sure what the work actually contains. Maybe just consulting? Maybe helping a team out upgrading their apps or doing refactors?

Maybe I will also scrap the idea and focus more on life™.

Open Source #

My plan for 2022 was to do less open source work. I didn't follow my plan and released a couple of projects or new versions that seem to be enjoyed by a couple of people.

After adding sidecar to screeenly in fall 2021, I packaged my code up and released it as a package in spring 2022: sidecar-browsershot.
Aaron helped make the package even better and used it as an example in various talks to showcase what's possible with sidecar.

changelog-updater got traction too.
The action now helps the Laravel team make their weekly releases easier, is used in many (all?) Spatie packages and in lots and lots of packages that used spatie/skeleton-php as their starting point for new PHP and Laravel packages.
Makes me so happy, that this little action helps automate a small step in the workflows of many projects and made changelogs much more useful.

git-auto-commit also grew in popularity and usage. Such a silly little action, but so versatile. I'm always amazed what people are using it for, when they explain their usage when they have a general question or open an issue. Adding a "for the 80% use case" message to the project early on was a good decicion for my mental health too. It has become my go-to answer for feature requests that are very specific or would be quite complicated to implement.

Was also blown away that I received a one time sponsorship from GitHub this year. ♥️

Epilogue #

2022 hasn't been an easy year for many. I'm grateful I could keep a positive outlook in this bizarre world we're living in.
Also eternally grateful for having good health and my body hasn't started falling apart (yet) now that I'm in my thirties.

There are only a couple of days left in 2022. I'm now gonna spend those reading books, watching british baking TV shows and cook and bake for friends and family.
See you all in 2023.